Gen Con 2020: HABA Games with T. Caires

For Gen Con online, we interview T from HABA about a few of their new releases: 5er Finden, Cloaked Cats, Barnyard Bunch, and new Animal upon Animal sets.

HABA USA announced some new games this week, but stay tuned for the Thursday HABA panel that will announce one more!

New versions of Animal upon Animal

Animal upon Animal: Unicorns and Animal upon Animal: Dinos! Not a whole lot to say here except they are super cute and able to be intermixed with other Animal upon Animal sets. Find them at Barnes & Noble this fall, and during Gen Con online you can buy them directly from habausa.com.

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5er Finden

HABA is dipping its toes into roll-and-writes. We’ve already seen Color It! – a roll-and-color for the whole family (we tried a play-along with the Before You Play channel on Youtube).

But 5er Finden is a more typical roll-and-write. Roll the five dice; find unique shapes on your board that contain all five symbols that were rolled. Once someone has found five shapes, everyone else gets a minute to finish up, then shapes are scored. Record scores on a separate dry-erase board, then erase your own board and do another round. Of course, you play five rounds (in keeping with the theme!)

Spatial reasoning and pattern recognition are skills that kids can compete with adults quite successfully, so as with many HABA games, the adults don’t have a big advantage here.

Available at Gen Con (starting this week) for $20.

Cloaked Cats

Cloaked Cats is another family strategy game. In this logical deduction game with “bougie cats” (masquerade ball), you use the cat cards played to determine the identifying features of the other players.

Play a cat card. Then all players must put one of their mask tokens on the cat if they match any of the cat’s features.

Try to unmask the other attendees while keeping your own identifying features secret!

You should be able to find this at your local game store for around $20.

Barnyard Bunch

For the younger gamers, this cooperative game is all about keeping animals on the farm. It works like a reverse tower-defense: contain the animals and prevent them from escaping!

Every animal starts in the center by the barn. On your turn, roll the die. Every animal standing on a space that matches the rolled color will move forward. Then flip a card, which could be negative (animal moves farther) or positive (farmer moves one animal one space back, dog moves an animal all the way back to the barn).

A good step up from HABA’s My Very First games while still working on core skills like color matching and taking turns.

Barnyard Bunch should be available at your local toy or game store for $15.

Find out more from HABA

During Gen Con (until August 2), look for the HABA “booth” at www.habausa.com/gen-con-online/ and their Discord server full of friendly staff. They’re running demos and happy to answer questions about games for specific ages.

After GenCon, find them on Twitter at @HABAGamesUSA or talk to T directly at @TheOneTAR.

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Music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?

Game images used with permission from HABA USA.